Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review
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Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review Editors Damien W. Riggs & Vicki Crowley The Australian Psychological Society Ltd. ISSN 1833-4512 Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review Editor Damien W. Riggs, The University of Adelaide Editorial Board Graeme Kane, Eastern Drug and Alcohol Service Gordon A. Walker, Monash University Jim Malcom, The University of Western Sydney Robert Morris, Private practice Liz Short, Victoria University Brett Toelle, The University of Sydney Jane Edwards, Spencer Gulf Rural Health School Warrick Arblaster, Mental Health Policy Unit, ACT Murray Drummond, The University of South Australia General Information All submissions or enquires should be directed in the first instance to the Editor. Guidelines for submissions or for advertising within the Gay and Lesbian Issues in Psychology Review (‘the Review’) are provided on the final page of each issue. http://www.groups.psychology.org.au/glip/glip_review/ The Review is listed on Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory: http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ Aims and scope The Review is a peer-reviewed publication that is available online through the Australian Psychological Society website. Its remit is to encourage research that challenges the stereotypes and assumptions of pathology that have often inhered to research on lesbians and gay men (amongst others). The aim of the Review is thus to facilitate discussion over the direction of lesbian and gay psychology in Australia, and to provide a forum within which academics, practitioners and lay people may publish. The Review is open to a broad range of material, and especially welcomes research, commentary and reviews that critically evaluate the status quo in regards to lesbian and gay issues. The Review also seeks papers that redress the imbalance that has thus far focused on the issues facing white lesbians and gay men, to the exclusion of other sexual and racial groups. Copyright Whilst the Review is a peer-reviewed, ISSN registered journal, in the interest of fair practice the copyright of work published remains with the author. However, the Review requests that work published elsewhere acknowledges that it was originally published in the Review, and that the same piece of work is not published for free elsewhere online. Upon submitting a manuscript for publication in the Review, contributing authors warrant that they have not already had the manuscript published elsewhere, and that they have the appropriate permission to reproduce any copyrighted material (eg. diagrams) which forms part of their manuscript. Publications of the Society are distributed to various other publications for review and abstracting purposes. In addition, the Society has contractual agreements with various secondary publishers for the republication, in hard copy, microfilm or digital forms, of individual articles and journal issues as a whole. Upon acceptance of their manuscripts by the Society for publication in this Review, authors who retain copyright in their work are deemed to have licensed the Society to reproduce their works, as they appear in the Review, through secondary publication. Disclaimer Work published within the Review does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Australian Psychological Society. Whilst the APS supports the work of the Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group, it also adheres to its own standards for practice and research that may at times conflict with those of the Review. Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review Volume 3 Number 3 Contents Editorial : Queer cultural producers 147 Damien W. Riggs and Vicki Crowley Articles Creative queer Singapore: The illiberal pragmatics of cultural production 149 Audrey Yue ‘Gay marriage’, lesbian wedding 161 Barbara Baird Recognition factors 171 Rosslyn Prosser The hegemonic aesthetic 175 Shaun M. Filiault & Murray J.N. Drummond Psychology, liberalism, and activism: Challenging discourses of ‘equality with’ in 185 the same-sex marriage debate Damien W. Riggs Commentary Comment on Duffy (2007) 195 Sophie Pointer Book Reviews Challenging lesbian norms: Intersex, transgender, intersectional and queer perspectives 196 Sue Kentlyn Calls for Papers GLIP Review: Mental health and LGBT people Health Sociology Review: Community, family, citizenship and the health of LGBTIQ people Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007 EDITORIAL: QUEER CULTURAL PRODUCERS DAMIEN W. RIGGS & VICKI CROWLEY This issue of the Review takes as its communities as well as the broader starting place a forum that was convened Australian and international community. as part of the 2006 Adelaide Feast Covering issues from ‘same-sex marriage’ Festival, a yearly cultural programme to representations of gay men in comics, featuring local and international LGBTIQ from creative industries and queer cultures events. The forum marked a second in Singapore to narratives of lesbian collaboration between the Cultures of the embodiment, the authors contribute to an Body Research Group from the University understanding of the complex ways in of South Australia and was convened by which cultural production takes place, and the outgoing Feast director Fanny the multiple ways in which cultures Jacobson. It provided an important venue themselves can be read. for LGBTIQ issues from within both the academy and community to come together In the first paper Audrey Yue, the keynote in one place. Speakers presented speaker at the forum, examines how the theoretical analyses, shared personal development of creative industries within narratives, screened performance pieces, Singapore represents an ‘illiberal read poetry and presented artworks for pragmatics’, whereby queer people are display. What came out of the event was a included in some respects and excluded in sense that theory, art and activism are others. Questioning the hegemony of the often intimately interwoven in the lives of ‘post-Stonewall’ logic of queer liberation, LGBTIQ people, and that paying attention Yue asserts the specificities of queer to just one aspect could result in a failure cultural production in Singapore, and its to understand the breadth and diversity role in the queering of Singapore itself. that exists within LGBTIQ communities. Barbara Baird takes up the issue of post- The forum took as its starting place the Stonewall politics in her insightful paper on notion of ‘queer cultural producers’, and ‘gay marriage’. Baird places this term the presenters examined, in varying ways, under question in order to examine how the ways in which queer cultures are calls for ‘same-sex marriage rights’ may be produced, how queer cultures destabilise understood as an aspect of the or challenge mainstream cultures, and normalisation of queer rights that have importantly, how queer cultures destabilise persisted in varying forms in the Western themselves – how the diversity within world since Stonewall. Baird challenges us LGBTIQ communities presents a radical to consider how the ‘sex’ in ‘same-sex’ challenge to notions of coalitionism. disappears when marriage becomes all Nonetheless, the overall message from the about the ‘respectable same-sex couple’. forum was that links and supportive Baird’s paper is a salient reminder of the frameworks can be developed through a complexities of debates over queer rights shared commitment to examining and and their location within broader political challenging cultural production, in its and personal economies whereby the ‘pink normative and queer forms. dollar’ plays a significant role in the production of particular (dominant) queer The papers presented in this issue of the cultures. Review demonstrate the breadth of the forum and its attention to cultural In her ficto-critical work, Ros Prosser production across a range of spaces, both provides a narrative of lesbian bodies that public and intimate. All of the authors call threads together the memories of bodies into question the ways in which cultural past with the experiences of bodies norms function to produce particular present. Prosser questions what it means bodies, and importantly the authors turn to be a lesbian, and moreover a lesbian this critical gaze upon LGBTIQ inhabiting a particular space and time ISSN 1833-4512 © 2007 Author and Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Interest Group of the Australian Psychological Society RIGGS & CROWLEY: EDITORIAL wherein certain bodies claim space over on issues of cultural production within others, both within lesbian communities lesbian communities. and with-out. Prosser speaks of lesbian cultural production, of resistance, of Together these papers are a reminder of conformity, and most frequently of the exciting and stimulating environment uncertainty. Prosser’s work reminds us that can result from collaborations that the ‘lesbian archive’ is far more between arts and cultural festivals and the complex than it may often seem. academy. Fanny Jacobson’s commitment to challenging norms within queer Shaun Filiault and Murray Drummond communities and to foregrounding the usefully extend previous work on the frisson of ideas, intellectual and other concept of hegemonic masculinity to creative production often put aspects of examine its constitutive parts, and in Feast at odds with those who sought a particular they highlight the importance of more ‘acceptable face’ for LGBTIQ examining the aspects of aesthetic that communities. The 2006 collaboration is shape gay men’s experiences of testament to a diverse range of cultural embodiment. By focusing on two markedly productions